In 1970, Physical Review split into sub-journals Physical Review A, B, C, and D. A fifth member of the family, Physical Review E, was introduced in 1993 to a large part to accommodate the huge amount of new research in nonlinear dynamics. Combined, these constitute Physical Review Series III.

To celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the journal, a memoir was published jointly by the APS and AIP.[3]

In 1998, the first issue of Physical Review Special Topics: Accelerators and Beams was published, and in 2005, Physical Review Special Topics: Physics Education Research was launched. In January 2016 the names of both journals were changed to remove "Special Topics".[4]Physical Review also started an online magazine, Physical Review Focus, in 1998 to explain and provide historical context for selected articles from Physical Review and Physical Review Letters. This was merged into Physics in 2011. The Special Topics journals are open access; Physics Education Research requires page charges from the authors, but Accelerators and Beams does not. Though not fully open access, Physical Review Letters also requires an author page charge, although this is voluntary. The other journals require such a charge only if manuscripts are not prepared in one of the preferred formats.[5] Authors can pay extra charges to make their papers open access.[6] Such papers are published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC-BY).[7]Physical Review Letters celebrated their 50th birthday in 2008.[8] The APS has a copyright policy to permit the author to reuse parts of the published article in a derivative or new work, including on Wikipedia.[9]

The APS has an online publication entitled Physics,[10] aiming to help physicists and physics students to learn about new developments outside of their own subfield. This now includes the general-interest articles that appeared as Physical Review Focus. It also publishes Physical Review X,[11] an online-only open access journal. It is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes, as timely as possible, original research papers from all areas of pure, applied, and interdisciplinary physics. In 2014 Physical Review Applied[12] began publishing research across all aspects of experimental and theoretical applications of physics, including their interactions with other sciences, engineering, and industry. In 2016 the APS launched Physical Review Fluids "to include additional areas of fluid dynamics research",[13] and in 2017 it launched Physical Review Materials "to fill a gap" in the coverage of materials research.[14]

^ abcVolumes 133-140 of the Series II in years 1964 and 1965 were split into issues A and B. Later they were unified into a single series again.[15] They are different from Phys. Rev. A and B of the third series. For example "Phys. Rev. 133 A1 (1964)" is an article of Ser. II, while "Phys. Rev. A 1 1 (1970) is of Phys. Rev. A.